Huge Holes in the Earth: Open-Pit Mines Seen From Space

People have become significant earth movers, outpacing all sources of natural erosion. More and more of our footprint can be seen from space in many forms, including cities, reservoirs, agriculture and deforestation. Among the most impressive human scars on the planet are open-pit mines.

We’ve gathered some of the biggest, most spectacular and interesting mines, as captured by astronauts and satellites on the following pages.

Above: Berkeley Pit, Butte, Montana

This former copper mine operated between 1955 and 1982. Gold and silver were also mined. An elaborate system of pumps and drains kept the local water level low enough for mining. Today, the 1,780 foot-deep pit is filled with around 900 feet of very contaminated water filled with metals and chemicals such as arsenic, cadmium, pyrite, zinc, copper and sulfuric acid. The water can be as acidic as battery acid, and copper can actually be “mined” directly from the water.

Currently, the 1-mile-by-0.5-mile pit is listed as a federal Superfund site with the potential to contaminate surrounding ground water, and, surprisingly, is also a tourist attraction, complete with gift shop and $2 admission fee.

This photograph was taken Aug. 2, 2006, by astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

The Escondida mine, opened in 1990 at 10,000 feet in northern Chile’s Atacama desert, currently produces more copper than any other mine in the world, with 1.5 million tons in 2007, worth more than $10 billion and representing nearly a tenth of world copper production. More than 6,000 people work at the mine.

This image was captured in 2000 by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer aboard NASA’s Terra satellite.

Located 20 miles outside Salt Lake City in the Oquirrh Mountains, the Bingham Canyon copper pit has produced more than 18 million tons of copper over its lifetime, more than any other mine in the world. The pit is about 2.75 miles wide and 4,000 feet deep. Two Empire State buildings stacked one on top of the the other wouldn’t reach the top. By 2015, the mine will be 500 feet deeper, and a third Empire State building will fit inside. The terraces inside the pit, which provide a base for the digging equipment and also stabilize the slopes, can be more than 80 feet high. Opened in 1904, the site has been named a historic landmark.

This photograph was taken Sept. 20, 2007, by astronauts aboard the International Space Station with a digital camera and an 800mm lens.

The Yuba Goldfields are a strange culmination of years of pressure-jet mining for gold upstream in the Sierra Nevada, dredging the tailings out of the river, and mining the tailings for gold and then later for gravel. The result is an odd landscape of reddish-brown and gray hills of gravel with water-filled ravines in between.

Shortly after gold was discovered in the Sierra Nevada in 1848, panning gave way to highly destructive hydraulic mining, which involves blasting sediment away with high-powered jets of water. Gold was extracted from the gravel, which was then dumped and carried downstream by rivers into the Sacramento Valley. The Yuba River ended up with 685 million cubic feet of the mine waste, which raised the level of the river, overflowed the banks and buried farms.

Dredging of the Yuba began in 1893, and soon after, mining companies began to sift and resift through the debris to extract ever-smaller bits of gold. By 1970, all economically feasible gold removal had been completed, and mining of the gravel for concrete began. Today, ownership of the land is disputed among mining companies, private owners and the government.

This image was taken by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer on NASA’s Terra satellite Aug. 29, 2001.

Located in the Andes Mountains in southern Peru, the Toquepala mine is 1.5 miles wide and 2,300 feet deep. The mine’s main output is copper, but it also produces gold, silver and molybdenum. The railroad that was constructed to carry the ore 60 miles to the coast can be seen winding down a canyon left of the center, heading southwest from the mine. This image was captured by astronauts aboard the International Space Station on Sept. 22, 2003.

The Freeport Mine, also known as the Grasberg complex, is a huge mining operation in Indonesia’s Sudirman Mountains. Copper was discovered here in 1936, and gold was first found in 1988. Today, the mine is one of the largest gold- and copper-extraction operations in the world. The open pit is 2.5 miles wide, and there is extensive underground mining in the area as well. Glaciers are also visible in the image.

This photograph was taken June 25, 2005, by astronauts on the International Space Station.

The Cananea mine is located 25 miles south of the United States border in Sonora, Mexico. The active Colorada Pit in the upper right is 1.6 miles across. It is one of the largest copper producers in the world and also contains gold. Those two metals are often found together where hot magma forced its way up into the overlying bedrock. The magma crystallized there while hot fluids circulated through it and into fractures in the surrounding rock, altering the rock to produce copper-rich minerals and gold.

A 1906 miner’s strike at Cananea turned violent and resulted in 19 deaths, contributing to events that led to the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Another strike stopped work at the mine in 2007.

This image was taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station on March 3, 2008.

Phosphate mining is an important industry in Jordan, which has abundant deposits of the mineral on approximately 60 percent of its territory. Phosphorus is essential to living things, and food can’t be produced without it. Some scientists fear a shortage of this critical resource is impending and have predicted the world will reach “Peak Phosphorus,” the point at which production will begin to decline, just 30 years from now. There is currently no synthetic alternative.

This image was capture by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA’s Terra satellite Sept. 17, 2005. It is a false-color composite of visible and infrared images. Vegetation appears red, water is blue, and rock and soil can be anywhere from buff to black. The mining operation is the area just left of center in the lower part of the image that appears striped.

Copper was first mined from this area just south of the mining town of Ajo, Arizona, around 1750. The open-pit mine pictured above began being excavated in earnest in 1912. It was shut down in 1983 when the price of copper dropped. The scalloped land just to the right of the mine is covered in tailings, and the large gray rectangles above that are containment ponds where the metal was extracted.

The bright white-and-dark-blue–striped areas on the right side of this image are opencast coal mines in midwestern Germany. One of the mines is currently being worked by the Bagger 293, the largest machine in the world. The bucket-wheel excavator is twice as long as a soccer field and as tall as a 30-story building, and digs up 30 million tons of lignite per year.

This image, captured by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer aboard NASA’s Terra satellite Aug. 26, 2000, is a simulated natural-color image. The bright-green rectangular patches are crops, the gray patches are bare ground, and the bluish-gray areas are towns.